Breaking News: Fat People Have Sex!

Lesley Kinzel is one of my favorite people that I have never met. She is a smart, funny, fat chick who, along with several other internet fatties, helped change my entire life and way of relating to my body, sex, and pretty much everything, since I move through the world using a body, and since I’m a woman so clearly the way I look is the most important thing about me.

Lesley writes for XO Jane, the new Jane Pratt web thing, these days. Yesterday she posted an interview with Hanne Blank, another rad fat person and author of lots of things, including the newly-reissued Big, Big Love, a book about fat people and sex.

It’s a great interview!. You should go read it! Fat hate is completely ubiquitous these days, what with the fact-free panic about the obesity epidemic, but Chris Christie’s time in the national spotlight has really brought out the ugly. It makes me sad to see people I respect, and who I know consider themselves to be committed to social justice, shitting all over someone for being fat just because they don’t like his politics.

So if you, like me, really needed an anti-fat-hate booster shot, this should do the trick. Here’s a snippet:

The spectrum of human sexuality is vast. Body size does not change this fact. I wanted as many fat people as possible — as many people, period — to feel that my book had something to say to them, regardless of what the specific and personal constellation of their sexuality might look like.

People need to know that the sexuality of other people is not, in point of fact, a completely foreign and unintelligible country, even if it is quite unlike their own. And people need to know that other fat people whose sexuality may not be familiar or comfortable nevertheless face some of the same specifically fat-related issues.

In the end, for me, it’s about solidarity. It’s hard to create a human sense of solidarity, to encourage a sense that we’re all in this business of life and sexuality together in our bodies of so many different sizes and shapes — and we are — if you don’t actively build inclusion into the picture.